so secunia did a test with exploits they developed in the lab and found that av products sucked...

well gee, doesn't that sound an awful lot like the consumer reports test? if you don't make the distinction that exploits are a special case of malware then there would really be no difference between this and that terrible consumer reports test where they paid to have 5000 new pieces of malware created...

but exploit code is a special case, we need to create benign exploits, we need to be able to use them in order to determine whether our systems are vulnerable, whether the patches that supposedly fix the vulnerability have been applied properly, whether they truly fix the vulnerability, etc...

so then this test was alright then, right? nope, not by a long shot... first and foremost is the idea that anti-virus/anti-malware products should detect these lab-grown exploits in the first place... the issue is not so much that av is only in the business of detecting malicious software, it's that there are very good reasons why av can't and shouldn't be detecting benign exploits... as i just got finished saying, we need those exploits, we need to be able to use them, but how are you supposed to do that if your anti-virus is blocking access to them? it's one thing to use a benign exploit to test the vulnerable surface area of your systems, it's another thing altogether to turn off your security software to do so... there are a variety of technical, logistical, and legal reasons why anti-malware must be constrained to detecting only those things with a proven malicious pedigree, and if people don't like that it's just too bad - get over it, those reasons aren't going away just because they don't mesh with your ideology... either exploits are legitimate and necessary, in which case anti-malware apps shouldn't be alarming on them because it interferes with the proper use of exploits, or they aren't, in which case secunia acted in bad faith by creating new malware - secunia can't have their cake and eat it too...

the next problem was this notion of detecting exploitation... read that carefully - "detecting exploitation"... is exploitation a thing? no, it's a behaviour, and despite certain claims from various companies about dynamic behaviour-based heuristics, known-malware scanners (and by all indications that's the only part of the security suites secunia actually tested, begging the question why they bothered with the suites at all - incompetence maybe?) are built to detect bad actors not bad actions... that's not to say anti-malware companies don't have offerings to detect and even block bad or unauthorized behaviour, they do have HIPS offerings, but it's fundamentally different technology from what people are accustomed to with anti-malware and it's not always simple to setup/maintain properly so they don't necessarily bundle it with their anti-malware products or even in their internet security suites...

speaking of the distinction between actors and actions, that confusion seemed to be rooted in the use of the term "threat"... i have in the past remarked that "threat" is a bit of an ambiguous term where all kinds of things with "threat" in their name get called simply threats... in this case in particular, anti-malware apps use the term "threat" as a short form of "threat agent" (which is actually one of the more common things that "threat" is used to represent)... exploitation isn't an agent by any stretch of the imagination but because everything gets called simply a "threat" those who don't really understand what's going on (which surprisingly seems to include the folks at secunia) will treat all usages of the term the same and not realize that anti-malware scanners are only designed to catch some of the things that get called "threat"...

of course, a post on this site wouldn't be complete without pointing out the conflict of interest that is also present in this test... secunia's business is about vulnerabilities and exploits - they have a paid product for detecting vulnerable software (a different approach to the same ends as trying to catch/block the exploits) so it's in their financial best interests to publish a test that makes the anti-malware industry look bad (aka FUD) and the exploit problem look important (in other words, hyping up the problem)... it's a classic self-serving study and one wonders if the people responsible think the rest of us were born yesterday...